Comments on: Address Books: Incentive, Finally, But Still No Sync

By: SunnyWu.net » Blog Archive » Google Apps’ Massive Achilles’ heel - Missing Contacts Synchronization

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 14:15:31 +0000

[...] there were people attempting to achieve the holy grail of Contact Synchronization here, here and here with Gmail but they all ultimately cannot get around the missing synchronization feature and could [...]

By: Greg Bays

Greg Bays — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:50:56 +0000

Greasemonkey works for me to sync Plaxo and Gmail address books. It’s not available “everywhere” but if you have a Firefox browser, it does the trick. As far as a Gmail Address Book API, you’ve got to be clever to find it. I touch upon it on my blog and provide links to the packet data and the application it was learned from.

http://plaxo4gmail.blogspot.com/2007/03/gmail-address-book-packet-data.html

The true API has not been developed, but I have been decompiling the code and it’s all there. Groups, and contacts, delete, add and update.

By: Joe Hildebrand

Joe Hildebrand — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 18:49:03 +0000

I’ve updated the roster getter. It now does TSV or CSV, prints to files, checks errors, and the like. Get it from http://livefreeordont.com/getRoster.tgz

By: Joe Hildebrand

Joe Hildebrand — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 05:30:04 +0000

Cool, I’m glad it worked. Let me clean it up a bunch, and I’ll post it somewhere. Any feature requests other than docs, error checking, different output formats?

By: sogrady

sogrady — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:15:42 +0000

Geof: ditto, particularly as i move to create an increasing number of SaaS based apps.

Joe: a big duh on my part - i’d been using the full user@host, rather than just user. my bad - works just fine now, outputting the full Gmail roster. very cool.

have you made this available anywhere? simple though it may be, i can see it being useful for folks. GrandCentral, for example, could skip the “export to CSV” step and grab directly from Gmail.

By: Joe Hildebrand

Joe Hildebrand — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 03:14:31 +0000

Hm. To troubleshoot:

1) make sure you call it like this: “python getRoster.py user pass”. That version takes just a username, not a user@host JID, and has the server hardwired. You get what you pay for.

1a)Actually, I just called it wrong by passing in user@host, and it hung in an infloop because I wasn’t checking an error code. I bet that’s the issue.

2) Take out the “, debug=[]” on line 28. This should print copious debug info. Here’s the patch:

28c28
c = xmpp.client.Client(SERVER) #, debug=[])

Let me know the last thing that gets printed.

3) Gmail sometimes takes a few seconds to connect, due to TLS handshake.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:43:42 +0000

I’m curious to see where it will go. For all I need it for right now, I do fine with Apple’s Address Book and my Treo. But yes, there are times when it would be great to have something in the Web that would have some interop.

That said … I kinda liked Pine.